Smoky skies has Albertans buying air

CALGARY — An Edmonton company that sells Alberta air is seeing a spike in sales during wildfire season because people just want a breath of fresh air.

Vitality Air was launched in 2014 by two Edmonton men hoping to cash in on the crisp Canadian air.

“We were looking at bottled water and we said, ‘Why shouldn’t we try bottled air?’ Air and water are heading in the same direction. It’s not getting better, it’s just getting worse,” said Moses Lam, co-founder of Vitality Air.

Vitality Air started out as a joke — its first sandwich bag of air sold for 99 cents — but has since turned into a full-fledged business. People from China, India, Mexico and the United States are buying cans of air harvested from Banff and Lake Louise. And even though the pickings are a little hazy in the mountain parks right now, Lam said they have clean air on hand because they’re able to collect 200,000 litres of air at a time, which, once packaged, is good for up to two years. Lam said the company does most of their collection in the winter, when the air is especially crisp.

To do this, Lam and his partner, Troy Paquette, take a trailer filled with large, empty tanks to the parks and suck up the air through a giant vacuum. They bring it back to their facility in Edmonton, where they package it into smaller, compressed eightlitre bottles fitted with a breathing mask, which are sold for $28.99 a pop — and up. Each bottle provides about 160 breaths of air, the company claims.

Lam said most of Vitality Air’s sales come from clients in China and India, where air pollution is a major concern. The odd sale to an Albertan usually is just a gag gift for loved ones who’ve left the province.

“People in Alberta don’t usually buy our air because they can drive to Banff and be there all day for free,” Lam said.

But Lam said since the wildfires in British Columbia have been sullying air quality in Alberta, they’ve seen a rise in Canadian customers — and most of the orders have been coming from Alberta and British Columbia.

“In the last week or so, in Canada, we did close to 200 bottles and we’re used to doing five or 10 bottles a week,” Lam said. “So, it’s a huge spike for us and I think it definitely is correlated to the smoke and the wildfires.”

Vincent Agyapong, a University of Alberta psychiatry professor who has studied the mentalhealth effects in Fort McMurray after the 2016 wildfire, said “It’s not surprising” Vitality Air is seeing a rise in sales.

“To me, it’s an indication of the level of anxiety people are having in respect to the possible negative impact on their health because of the poor air quality that’s in the province at the moment,” Agyapong said.